Real-time bidding can be a bit of a tough thing to get into – as an outsider it can be hard to understand what actually happens with real-time bidding exchanges, and how to make the most of the bidding opportunities that present themselves to you. This guide will teach you what you need to know about real-time bidding exchanges and how they can benefit your company.

A Quick Introduction to RTB

Real-time bidding, or RTB for short, is a form of programmatic, computerized and algorithm-driven trading or buying advertising impressions in real time. In a similar way to how the stock market works, those using RTB use algorithms and strategies to buy ad placements that have a certain set value attributed to them.

There is unfortunately a limited “stock” of advert placements (inventory) available at one time, but RTB allows advertisers to bid on and acquire these ad-placements swiftly whilst staying within a set budget. This programmatic marketing, already popular on the web, is just now coming into its own on mobile advertising.

The Techniques of Successful Real-Time Bidding Exchanges

Real-time bidding allows you to bid against other advertisers on ad placements, and the price for the average bid usually depends on how valuable the ad impression advertisers are currently bidding on.

A good user of RTB will learn to look for the value in an impression, and balance that out against the current bids placed on the impression at the time. There’s no point paying excess for CPM when it comes from a source that won’t be valuable to you, but at the same time, you need to learn to control your bids when looking to acquire an ad impression that looks very valuable to your needs.

The greatest thing about real-time bidding exchanges is that, as the name suggests, it’s done in real-time, so you are purchasing impressions at the time of their value, and ensuring that you’re not only getting a decent CPM rate, but a CPM that brings in real benefits to your company.

Smaller companies may invest in less valuable impressions, but as a larger scale business, it may be smart to target the more valuable real-time bidding exchanges to ensure that your new traffic is actually worth your time.

Using Tools to Your Advantage

As the RTB market grows, more and more tools and platforms are becoming available to make use of. By doing your research first, you can learn about what these tools and platforms can help you with when using RTB. One of the most prominent platforms at the moment is SiteScout – this platform allows thousands of real-time bidding exchanges to go through their system every second, and they have plenty of tracking tools and information to ensure that the bids you place are worth every penny.
In particular for mobile traffic there are: Smaato, Mobclix oder auch Mopup – all of them we’re using on a daily basis.

At the end of the day, as long as you don’t go bidding for the most expensive impressions without any prior knowledge, RTB is a safe way to ensure new traffic to your app / mobile site that actually has value attached to it. You can monitor your impressions /clicks easier, and spend on advertising in small packages that fit within your budget. This means as ad-buyer you can attribute a return on the investment of the advertising spend. A huge step towards a much more transparent market.

Future of RTB

In August last year emarketer predicted for 2014 a 36% growth rate for the advertising spending in mobile on real time bidding exchanges. By 2017 almost every third display spending will be automated and programmatically bought. More and more standards of trading processes or advertising formats / products exchanged as well as settlement processes will be available and result in further acceleration of this shift towards digital advertising liquidity.

After all, it is clear the Future is RTB and it’s rather bright. The currently ongoing shift will result in higher efficiency in ad buying and selling which will in return benefit all participants on the demand as well as the supply side.

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